


my hands have made some good mistakes

by gsparkle



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Haircuts, Remix, Trust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-16
Updated: 2020-05-16
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:49:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24219166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gsparkle/pseuds/gsparkle
Summary: “I don’t know how to cut hair,” Clint points out.Natasha swings her hair over the back of the chair, long ringlets that twirl and untwirl like a curtain of bird scare rods. “I don’t care,” she replies, pushing the scissors into his hand.((a remix of the lovely"Carefully Placed Is Your Trust"by inkvoices))
Relationships: Clint Barton/Natasha Romanov
Comments: 24
Kudos: 100
Collections: be_compromised Remix Exchange 2020





	my hands have made some good mistakes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [inkvoices](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkvoices/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Carefully Placed Is Your Trust](https://archiveofourown.org/works/474844) by [inkvoices](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkvoices/pseuds/inkvoices). 



> Hooray for remix exchange! I loved how gentle the original was and wanted to explore how they arrived at that point. Title is from the poem ["Least of "](https://quidnunc-life.tumblr.com/post/185549170228/natalieweepoetry-i-kneel) by Natalie Wee. Thank you forever to **orimarvale**!!

They say when you lose one of your senses, the others become stronger. Perhaps this is why Clint knows there’s someone hovering outside his door even though the doorbell light isn’t flashing above it. He doesn’t need his hearing aids to feel the floorboard’s faint warping from the weight, or to sense that certain, subtle _other_ like the fine hairs at the back of his neck. It’s Maria Hill, he assumes, following up on the Richmond case, and that’s why he doesn’t pull on any extra clothing. If Hill doesn’t want to see his holey boxers, well, she shouldn’t come around after midnight.

But it’s not Hill standing there when he swings the door open. Last he’d heard, Romanoff-- _Romanova_ , he corrects himself, remembering the way her voice curls over the syllables like vodka on the rocks--had been undercover with the Triads, but she’s here now, so fresh from the shower that her hair’s still wrapped in a towel. 

"Lost?" Clint asks, acutely aware of every hole in these shitty old boxers now that he's standing in front of the deadliest woman on earth. Not that she appears particularly deadly at the moment--it's a difficult look to pull off in sweats and a towel turban--but he's seen her work. He knows.

"I'm here for a favor," Romanova says, her face impassive.

“This again?” Clint slumps against the doorjamb. “Romanova, you do not need to do me any favors. You owe me nothing, okay? _Nothing_ \--”

“I’m here because _I_ need a favor,” Romanova clarifies, shouldering him aside. Her towel smudges damply against his arm as she ducks under it. She says something else behind him, fuzzy and lost without his hearing aids, which he sighs and heads to his bedroom to grab. Her voice comes back on like finding a radio station in the static: “--believe that I’m off probation and I still can’t have sharp objects in my quarters without supervision. Like I’m gonna ruin a good santoku by _stabbing_ my handler in the femoral artery.”

How they’ve gotten from a favor to Phil’s imminent death, Clint isn’t sure. He catches up with Romanova mid-rummage through his kitchen junk drawer, a hum of triumph in her throat as she finally surfaces with a pair of scissors. “And the reason why you need my scissors in the middle of the night is…?”

She’s just as sharp as the shears in her hand: Clint watches as her annoyance darts from his face to his ears, registers the new presence of his hearing aids, and fades away. “I need a haircut,” she says, pulling out a kitchen chair and sliding the wet towel off her hair. Clint opens his mouth to object and she adds, “No, it can’t wait. Also, no, I don’t trust anyone on this wreck coming near me with any kind of blade.”

 _Anyone except you_ , Clint reads between the sparse lines. She’s only been with SHIELD a couple of months, and as the person assigned to be glued to her side, he’s seen the kind of attention she attracts. It would help, probably, if Romanova seemed the slightest bit apologetic, but while he saw remorse written all over her that night he’d changed his mind, she doesn’t seem to want anyone else to know that she has a soul.

“I don’t know how to cut hair,” Clint points out, because he knows better than to pick up on that conversational thread again.

Romanova swings her hair over the back of the chair, long ringlets that twirl and untwirl like a curtain of bird scare rods. “I don’t care,” she says, pushing the scissors into his hand.

“Romanova…” he tries, but the plea in her imperious glare overrides his protests. “How short?” he asks instead, wrapping her hair around his hand as carefully as he can. She points, impatient, as if she can tell that he’s hesitating, that something about her always stalls him from taking the shot.

“I’d like to go to sleep sometime tonight,” she says after a moment of his indecision, snotty in the way that only the Black Widow can get away with.

“Like this is _my_ fault,” Clint retorts, but he closes his eyes and snips once, twice, three times before she can say anything else. It’s not a good idea to cut hair with your eyes closed: he’s cut at three different angles that even he can see don’t work together, and he’s going to have to cut higher up to even it out. If Romanova hears his huff of distress, she doesn’t show it; the more he snips, in fact, the more tension seems to drip off her shoulders, dropping to the floor with her growing pile of hair.

“That’s enough,” she says once her hair curls just against the nape of her neck. Some of it does, at any rate: Clint can see it’s uneven and jagged, terribly done. “I don’t care,” she says when he tries to point this out. She hunts through his closet for a broom and sweeps up the mess, dodging each time he tries to clip a little more. Finally she snatches the scissors from him and sticks them back in the drawer. “It’s fine, Barton,” she insists, then adds an uncharacteristically gentle, “Thank you.”

It’s 2:13 AM and the constant thrum of the Helicarrier engines floats between them as she scoops up her towel and moves for the door. Hand on the doorknob, she turns and smiles, a curve of her lips as soft as she is dangerous. “And hey, call me Natasha, yeah?” 

  
  


The second Clint enters his apartment, juggling too many sacks of groceries because he’s never going to learn his lesson, he sees Natasha sprawled across the couch, her hair hanging like a tapestry over the armrest. “I need a haircut,” she calls, her floating voice cut off with an _oof_ as Lucky bounds over and leaps squarely onto her stomach. “And you need to stop feeding this dog so much pizza.”

There’s no point in asking Natasha how she’s procured a key. Charmed one out of Simone, probably, or stole his and made a copy. Maybe she just picked the lock: that’s the simplest answer, in any case, and Natasha always prefers the simplest solutions.

“No and no,” Clint calls back, grimacing at the ancient head of lettuce he pulls out of the fridge to make room for beer. “Call Hill, she’s probably good with scissors.”

He doesn’t hear Natasha roll off the couch, but then, he’d be worried if he could. “I don’t _want_ Hill to cut my hair,” she says right behind him, reaching around to snag a beer. She cracks the top expertly against the Formica counter, then leans against it, staring him down. “You’re my partner. You have to do it.”

There’s a butterfly bandage across her nose and another at her temple; in between sips, she holds the cool neck of her beer bottle against the split in her lip. Her hair’s gotten long on this assignment, twisted over her shoulder into a thick tangle that hangs nearly to her elbow. There’s a look in her eyes that he hasn’t seen since the last time she barged into his apartment uninvited, one that reminds him a little of tigers in cages and hot, shaken bottles of soda.

“Fine,” Clint concedes at length, turning away from whatever it is she’s barely containing to look for a pair of scissors. He points Natasha to one of the stools under his counter: it’s too high a seat, but he doesn't have regular chairs and he’ll be damned if he’s going to find hair trimmings in his couch for the rest of the year. “How long this time?”

“Shoulder length is fine,” she says, shrugging. _At least one of us is relaxed_ , he thinks, wrapping a regular rubber band around her hair, wincing as it snags, cringing at the first snip of the scissors. “It’s just hair,” she adds, obviously catching his warped reflection in the stainless steel of the refrigerator.

 _It’s not. It should be a crime to ruin hair like this_ , Clint thinks, his scissors doing their well-intentioned worst. There’s nobody at SHIELD with hair like Natasha’s, vibrant and wild and riotous, red like victory and blood and the hourglass on her namesake spider. When he’d tracked her around the world, he’d wondered if it was vanity to never dye her hair, even after he’d seen her, or just brazen confidence, and if it mattered, anyway. 

“Will you at least tell me _why_ you need a haircut the second you’re back from a trip,” he asks aloud, trying not to look at the jagged edges he’s made. For a while, there’s nothing but the _shwip_ of the scissors and the huff of Lucky snoring on the couch. Par for the course, he figures: he’s known her long enough now to know that simply ignoring a question is one of Natasha’s favorite ways to evade conversations she doesn’t want to have. He talks about other things, the incoming rainstorm and the Yankees crushing the Mets again, the pool in the office about how long Sitwell is going to try to pull off a toupee. He talks, and he trims unevenly, until there’s nothing left to cut.

“Thanks,” Natasha says, her voice wafting out from the little bathroom under the loft where she inspects his work in the mirror. “This is perfect.” It’s plainly not--the imperfections glare like strobe lights--but she doesn’t look like a containment chamber on the brink of explosion anymore, so he keeps his mouth shut. “It’s undercover work,” she adds suddenly, a non sequitur. “I--after I’m undercover, I always cut my hair.” She very carefully inspects her thumbnail. “I used to do it myself, but, you know. I’ve got a partner now.” Now she looks at him, clearly hoping he has the other half of the smile on her lips. “You’ve gotta be good for something, right?”

“Right,” Clint says. He has follow up questions, but her foot is both literally and figuratively out the door already. “Yeah. Always. Whatever you need.” She nods, tucks her smile into the collar of her jacket, and slips out in another textbook Natasha avoidance technique.

  
  


In Porto Alegre, they’re Nina Milyutin, arms dealer, and Trevor Block, security detail.

In Auckland, they’re Curtis Sittenmeier, retired BMX biker, and Jana Wright-Sittenmeier, former groupie and new bride. 

In Milan, they’re Felix and Therese Collins, a pair of married fashion designers trying to sell their fashion makeover show to Italian television producers.

When they return from each of these places, Clint rides the subway home from the airport, walks Lucky, showers the smell of quinjets off his body, and waits. And each time, Natasha fails to appear, and says nothing the next day at work except to suggest that he get a new mattress, because he looks like he’s not sleeping.

Not sleeping? Of _course_ he’s not sleeping. He’s staring at his ceiling all night, wondering if she doesn’t trust him anymore, wondering what he’s done wrong. They’re friends now, he thinks, partners even off duty, and if he’s--if he’s ruined that, somehow, if she’s noticed that sometimes he can’t stop himself from watching the sunlight dance in her hair…

So he keeps not sleeping, keeps worrying, keeps bracing every time she smiles or frowns or even looks in his direction, until one day he comes into the office and her desk is empty. “Undercover?” Clint asks Hill, not as casually as he thinks from the way she squints back at him. “Oh, right, yeah,” Hill says like she doesn’t sign all the paperwork. “I think she’s on the op with May and Amirichetty.”

She’s gone for a month, a _miserable for reasons he won’t examine_ sort of month, a month that stretches like Coney Island taffy until it snaps one soggy, rainy night. He’s ordered pizza, but the knock on the door is Natasha, her jeans, sweatshirt, and canvas sneakers completely soaked through. 

“Raincoat much?” Clint asks, because it’s that or something embarrassing, like _oh thank god you came._

Natasha shrugs. “Wasn’t much better in Jakarta. Besides, you’ll lend me some dry clothes, right?”

“This is just so you can steal one of my sweatshirts again,” Clint tells her, looking away from the pale of her neck as she leans over the sink and twists water from her hair. “Don’t think I don’t know your tricks.” She laughs, but doesn’t deny it. He hears the quiet _fwoosh_ of the gas stove as he collects a pair of sweats in his loft, the slam of cabinet doors and the drawer that always sticks. He listens to Natasha making herself at home in his apartment and has to sit heavily on the bed, so violently wrings the sponge of his heart. _You can’t have that,_ begins the lecture to himself, maybe the best organized argument he’s ever made.

He’s in section C, point 2 in his outline when her soft footsteps steal up the stairs. “What are you doing?” she asks, a question Clint’s quite in the middle of asking himself. “This is a nice place,” she adds, depositing mugs of coffee and tea on his bedside table and scooping up her dry clothes. He resolutely does not think about the wet peel of denim and quiet cursing that happens behind him, nor about the fact that tomorrow his loft is going to smell like her cherry shampoo. 

“You going to cut my hair now, or what?” Natasha finally asks, throwing herself onto his bed like this is a slumber party and making grabby motions for her tea.

Startled, Clint nearly fumbles the pass, though he ignores the taunting raise of Natasha’s eyebrow. “I thought that deal was over,” he says after a steadying sip of coffee.

Her forehead furrows in disbelief. “I was undercover,” she says slowly, as if he’s an amnesiac. “Undercover equals haircut. You know this.”

The coffee in his hands fortunately prevents him from crossing his arms like a petulant child. “You didn’t need a haircut after Porto Alegre,” he points out. “Or Auckland. Or Milan.” It doesn’t make any sense, because he’s not even _good_ at cutting hair, but it--it matters, anyhow. “I assumed you just didn’t--”

“Trust you?” Natasha levers herself up to her knees and shuffles around until they’re eye to eye. “I trust you,” she says, her mug clinking against his like a toast, like a promise.

“Then why--” It feels dumb to ask. It feels necessary to ask.

Natasha blinks once, twice, slow in the lamplight. “I don’t know,” she admits, and he can tell it’s just as unsatisfying an answer to her as it is to him. “I didn’t get that, I dunno, that _feeling_ after those.” She pulls the scissors from where they’ve been tucked in her waistband; when she sets them deliberately in his hand, they’re warmed from her skin. "Please?" Her hand lingers, fingers brushing the seam between his wrist and his palm before she curls his hand around the blades and withdraws. _I don’t have that feeling when I’m with you_ , he wants this to mean. _Our partnership doesn’t need excising. You’re someone I don’t need to cut out._

“Finish your tea first,” Clint says, nudging her knee with his. He drinks to hide the hideous softness he feels shining in his eyes, but Natasha, he’s sure, sees it anyway. “Otherwise, it’ll be a mess.”

  
  


The op sucks.

The intel is unreliable, the plan is skeletal, and this dive tucked into the grungiest alley in Klaipėda has horrible sightlines. Clint’s in the best booth to keep an eye on the door, but that means he can only see Natasha from the dingy, pitted mirror angled over the bar. And it’s the kind of op where all he can do is sit and wait for trouble to manifest itself, the kind where Natasha does all the work while Clint’s professional admiration blurs at the edges, the kind he loves because Natasha in action is a privilege to witness, but also hates because he’s never learned not to want what he shouldn’t have.

And he’d tell her this op sucks, but there’s no comms because, again, _this op sucks_. He’s ready for it to go south, can feel it itching under his fingernails, and so he’s nursing just the single beer for over an hour now, waiting. Ideally, he’d be drinking a lot more, the better to drown out the thrum of his heart whenever he catches a corner of Natasha in the bar mirror; in fact, if he lets himself think about a true ideal situation, they’re at his apartment instead of this bar, slung together on his couch while he tries to keep the word _love_ from dissolving on his tongue.

But that’s not the kind of trouble he’s meant to deal with at the moment. _Trouble_ is the mark, Matis Zukas, who swaggers into the bar with his goons and makes directly for Natasha. She’s Katya Federova today, a buttoned-up smuggler of rare and dangerous goods who doesn’t really want to buy the glowing, possibly cursed artifact Zukas is desperate to offload. From his vantage point, Clint watches Zukas ply Katya with liquor to wear her down, then try his grabby hand at a little flattery and flirtation, resting one big hand on her knee, her waist, her shoulder.

This op _sucks_. Natasha is a professional--she plays slightly too drunk and pleasantly flattered to perfection--but Clint can see the erratic tap of her finger against her vodka as if it were a sledgehammer to the bar. Zukas’ big hand makes a mess of Katya’s braid and, for a heartbeat, Natasha’s sharp smile breaks out of the corners of Katya’s mouth. 

Zukas doesn’t know it yet, but that’s game over. Ten minutes later, Natasha flicks Clint a series of looks he finds unbearably attractive: the _this will be easy_ , the _damn I’m good at my job_ , and his personal favorite, the _let me show these idiots how it’s done_. He’s grateful to slide out the back door, entirely unnecessary, before he loses his entire mind and proposes marriage on the spot.

Outside, the sun sets a glittering red into the harbor, the air is summery, and a breeze of vaguely briny Baltic air combs through his hair. None of this is helpful; none of this helps the electric tension of his sparking nerves. On this beautiful night, all he can think about is the drum of Natasha’s fingers, the danger between her teeth, the way her hair itself seemed to resist Zukas like a live wire; he cycles through these over and over, until they merge into one single realization, until he finds himself stopping at the drugstore on his way back to the hotel.

“Thank god _that’s_ over,” Natasha sighs when she gets back twenty minutes later, pushing the door closed and leaning against it. “Pretty sure I sprained my thumb again; Medical’s gonna be mad at me, but when aren't they--” She breaks off, peering at his hands. “Are those--are those scissors?”

"Uh." Clint makes perhaps the least casual shrug in existence. “Yeah? Unless you want to wait until we get home.”

Natasha scans the room, her expression still unreadable as it passes over the receipt still crumpled on the bed. “You went and picked up scissors,” she says, half a step closer now. “For me.”

If this is a test, he didn’t study. “I--yeah,” he says again, not sure of the right answer. “I have electric clippers, too, in my suitcase. If you want it that short.” He pauses, then carefully adds, “I think I--I think I understand now.”

For a silent minute, Clint watches something liquid and undefined work behind Natasha’s eyes; but just as he’s about to call the whole thing off as a bad idea, she lets out a little huff, pulls off her tactical jacket to reveal her tank top underneath, and settles delicately at the bathroom vanity.

“I’ll tell you when,” she says, nodding at him in the mirror. This is new: not that he could ever forget whose hair he’s been entrusted with, but it’s usually a slightly more anonymous experience. Now she tracks his every move with her lip pulled between her teeth, something like a dare in her eyes. “More,” she says when he moves to stop, and their eyes meet like converging laser rays, because he’s watching her, too, cataloguing the way her nose twitches when hair falls on it, the shape of her sigh and the curve of her hands on each other. It becomes a conversation of sorts, and maybe this is why he feels every thump of his heart this time; maybe this is why Natasha shivers when the backs of his hands brush her bare shoulders. “More,” she says again, her eyes searing into his in the mirror, and he can’t tell if she means the hair or his hands. Deliberately, cautiously, he runs his fingertips along the nape of her neck before lifting the next section of hair, and a flush rises high on her cheeks. Without breaking eye contact, she tells him, “You can stop.”

Clint freezes. _Stop cutting, or stop touching,_ but he has his answer when she stands, turns, and takes the scissors from his hands. There’s no space between them but the air they breathe, no sound but the soft of their exhalations. _What now_ , Clint opens his mouth to say, but instead there’s the heat of Natasha’s mouth open against his, warmth that suffuses down his tongue and into his throat like spiced honey. Her hands cradle his jaw as she bites gently at his lip before kissing him again, thorough, unhurried, glorious.

“What now?” he does finally manage, blowing a clipping of hair from her nose.

“Now I go wash this off,” Natasha says, hands sliding from his face to his wrists. “And you help.”


End file.
